then he would nod ponderously— but it was the hero,
m om m y-in-law, w ho’d say things like “je w it dow n” because
she did the work o f maintaining the family values: fed the
family materially and spiritually. But m y husband wasn’t one
o f them; the worse they were, the purer, the more miraculous,
he was. He wasn’t o f them; he was o f me; o f what I was and
knew; o f what I thought and hoped; o f the courage I wanted to
have; o f the will I did have; o f the life I was leading, all risk and
no tom orrow; and he was born after the war like me; a child o f
after. So there was this legal thing; the law decrees; it made me
their daughter-in-law more than it made me his wife. There
was it and them on the one hand and then there was us: him in
exile from them— I thought he was as orphaned as I was; and
braver; I thought he was braver. I embraced him, and he
embraced me, and neither o f us knew nothing about
tom orrow and I never had. I didn’t wait for him like some
middle-class girl wanting a date or something in ruffles or
someone wanting a husband; I wasn’t one o f them and I didn’t
want a husband; I wanted a friend through day and night. I
didn’t ask him what he liked so I could bow and scrape and my
idea wasn’t to make him into someone safe, denatured. He
was an anarchist o f spirit and act and I didn’t want no burden
o f law on him. I just wanted to run with him, be his pal in his
game, and hold him; hold him. I indulged an affection for him,
a fraternal affection that was real and warm and robust and sort
o f interesting on its own, always sort o f reaching out towards
him, and I felt tender towards him, tender near him, next to
him, lying next to him; and we were intense, a little on edge,
when we holed up together, carnal; our home was the bed we
were in, a bed, an empty room, the floor, an em pty room,
maybe not a regular home like you see on television but we
wasn’t like them on television, there w asn’t tw o people like us
anywhere, so fragile and so reckless and so strong, we were
with each other and for each other, we didn’t hide where we
had been before, what we had done, we had secrets but not
from each other and there w asn’t anything that made us dirty
to each other and we embraced each other and we were going
to hole up together, kind o f a home, us against them, I guess,
and we didn’t have no money or ideas, you know , pictures in
your head from magazines about how things should be—
plates, detergents, how them crazy wom en smile in advertisements. It’s all around you but you don’t pick it up unless you got some time and money and neither o f us had ever
been a citizen in that sense. We were revolutionaries, not
consumers— not little boy-girl dolls all polished and smiling
with little tea sets playing house. We were us, unto ourselves.
We found a small place without any floor at all, you had to
walk on the beams, and he built the floor so the landlord let us
stay there. We planned the political acts there, the chaos we
delivered to the status quo, the acts o f disruption, rebellion.
We hid out there, kept low , kept out o f sight; you turn where
you are into a friendly darkness that hides you. We embraced
there, a carnal embrace— after an action or during the long
weeks o f planning or in the interstices where we drenched
ourselves in hashish and opium until a paralysis overtook us
and the smoke stopped all the time. I liked that; how
everything slowed down; and I liked fucking after a strike, a
proper climax to the real act— I liked how everything got fast
and urgent; fast, hard, life or death; I liked bed then, after,
when we was drenched in perspiration from what came
before; I liked revolution as foreplay; I liked how it made you
supersensitive so the hairs on your skin were standing up and
hurt before you touched them, could feel a breeze a mile away,
it hurt, there was this reddish pain, a soreness parallel to your
skin before anything touched you; I liked how you was tired
before you began, a fatigue that came because the danger was
over, a strained, taut fatigue, an ache from discipline and
attentiveness and from the imposition o f a superhuman
quietness on the body; I liked it. I liked it when the embrace
was quiet like the strike itself, a subterranean quiet, disciplined, with exposed nerve endings that hurt but you don’t say
nothing. Then you sleep. Then you fuck more; hardy; rowdy;
long; slow; now side by side or with me on top and then side
by side; I liked to be on top and I moved real slow, real
deliberate, using every muscle in me, so I could feel him
hurting— you know that melancholy ache inside that deepens
into a frisson o f pain? — and I could tease every bone in his
body until it was ready to break open, split and the m arrow ’d
spread like semen. I could split him open inside and he never
had enough. I had an appetite for him; anything, I’d do
anything, hours or days. In my mind, I wasn’t there for him so
much as I was the same as him. I could feel every muscle in his
body as if it were mine and I’d taunt each muscle, I’d make it
bend and ache and stretch and tear, I’d pull it slow, I’d make it
m ove toward me so much it w ould’ve come through his skin
except I’d make him come before his skin’d burst open. I didn’t
have no shyness around him and I didn’t have to act ignorant
or stupid because he wasn’t that kind o f man who wanted you
to overlay everything with the words o f a fool like you don’t
know nothing. Some was perverse according to how these
things are seen but that’s a concept, not a fact, it’s a concept
over people’s eyes so much you wish they would go blind to
get rid o f the concept once and for all. It’s how the law makes
you see things but we were different. We were inside each
other; a fact; wasn’t perverse; couldn’t be. We turned each
other inside out and it binds you and there w asn’t nothing he
did to me that I didn’t do to him and w e’d talk and cook and
roam around and drink and smoke and w e’d visit his friends,
which wasn’t always so good because to them I was this
something, I didn’t understand it but I hated it, I was this
something that came into a room and changed everything.
There were these guys, mostly fighters, anarchists, some
intellectuals, and when I came into the room everything was
different. I was his blood and that’s how we acted, not giggly
or amorous, but I think I was just this monstrous thing, this
girlfriend or wife, that is completely different from them and